Going Back To The Wells

The latest take on HG Wells’s classic the war of the worlds favours weighty socio-political themes over martian heat-rays. SFX meets the cast and crew of Fox’s uncomfortably realistic sci-fi epic

- Jamie Tabberer

No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” So reads the sublime (and extremely long!) opening sentence of HG Wells’s seminal 1897 science fiction tale The War Of The Worlds: a simple, powerful story, unprecedented at the time, about a human race utterly ill-prepared when Martians attack Earth, and the mass hysteria that ensues.

An avalanche of film and TV adaptations have arguably reduced the story to a cliché, however. Granted, Orson Welles’s 1938 radio drama, Byron Haskin’s 1953 film classic and Steven Spielberg’s inevitable balls-out 2005 blockbuster were all brilliant. But with countless spiritual descendants of varying quality over the years, was it any wonder last year’s BBC three-parter felt so… unnecessary?

Hot on its heels, however, is a new version from Fox, that not only eschews “same story syndrome” but has more in common with the essential, urgent viewing of Russell T Davies’s Years And Years than the period drama with which it shares its name. Why? Because it’s set in the present. And let’s face it, The War Of The Worlds’ age-old themes – the fear of invasion, the collapse of society – have never felt more pertinent than they do today.

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